Month: January 2013

After all, thanks to our very long New Year holidays, I had a chance to install OpenGrok search and cross reference engine. The main reason is to have a tool to be able to efficiently browse Linux kernel source code. I use OpenGrok quite frequently, especially when there is a need to dive into Solaris/OpenSolaris internals. Frankly speaking, I haven’t seen anything else that comes close to it. And you know what? It’s a trivial game to install and run OpenGrok on your favorite Linux distro, BSD, Mac OS X or Solaris. But since I use Ubuntu as my cloud server all further details will be provided having it in mind. I will refer to the default installation since in 99.9% cases that would be the choice (I guess).

There is however a small catch. The indexer is started with -Xmx option set to 2048m and this is done on purpose. Since I only had 512MB of RAM I tried to reduce Xmx down to 128, 256 and 512 megabytes but all the time I got “java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space” error. So in the end I temporarily increased the sizing of my cloud server to 4GB and only after that the indexer had finished successfully.
I’m happy with the overall result because even with 512MB OpenGrok works blazingly fast – come in and check. I’ll do my best to update it whenever there is a new Linux release. Since OpenGrok supports incremental updates that shouldn’t be a problem: